Paradise Found From The Streets Of Allentown To A Celebrity-filled Haitian Hideaway, It's Been A Long Road For Suzanne Laury Seitz

July 30, 1985|by CLAIRE WALTER, The Morning Call

The road from an Allentown childhood to a rich life as hostess to authors, actors and assorted jet-setters in Haiti is not well-marked. In fact, only Suzanne Laury Seitz has traveled it. She took few detours and never has looked back.

The tall, willowy blonde daughter of a Pennsylvania musician sought a career in hospital administration. After stint at Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, where she fell in with a show-business crowd (and even dated David Janssen), she decided to do something worthwhile with her life.

At that important crossroad of her young adulthood, Suzanne selected a route that took her to Schweitzer Hospital in Port-au-Prince. Like so many North Americans and Europeans, started hanging around the bar of the Grand Hotel Oloffson. Now she owns the place.

Eighteen years ago, the Oloffson - which is not grand in any conventional sense - was run by a gruff, cigar-chomping Runyonesque chap named Al Seitz. His own checkered career took him from a boyhood in New York to the distinction of being the only Jewish football player at the University of Alabama and finally to Haiti, where he was a merchant until he bought the Oloffson and turned himself into a hotel keeper.

It is quite a hotel to keep. The gingerbread-trimmed Victorian complex rambles through a few cool, lush acres on the edge of steamyPort-au-Prin ce. Picturesque it is (Graham Greene used it as the setting for "The Comedians"), but efficient it is not. To this day, there's no air conditioning, no elevator and no "sanitized for your protection" band in the bathroom.

Al loved to play host but seemed the archetypical confirmed bachelor, whose romances kept the barflies buzzing. That is, until Sue Laury waltzed in. Twenty-five years Al's junior, she enchanted him. And he intrigued her.

"When I look back now, I can't believe I did what I did," Sue says 18 years later. "I was such a cherub. I knew nothing. The hotel seemed like a magical castle, and Al reminded me of Rick in Casablanca. It all seemed quite sinister."

Sinister or not, the enchantment prevailed, and Al and Sue were wed in the Oloffson's bar. A cigar band was the wedding ring. Three sons followed in quick succession, yet Sue became increasingly wrapped up in the hotel, too. Al had fostered an air of slightly decadent elegance, which attracted jet-setters long before there were jets. Perhaps because celebrities, so used to being fawned over, enjoyed being guests of an innkeeper who did things his way.

Seitz loved to grouse that his policy was: "The guest is always wrong." When guests complained about something that in Al's view was unjustified, he suggested that they go elsewhere. The celebrities loved it.

Al began naming rooms after famous people who stayed at the Oloffson. The Harold Pinter Room is fittingly next to the Lady Antonia Fraser Room (his ex- wife). Others are named after Anne Bancroft, Dave Garroway and Stan Schulberg, brother of author Budd ("On the Waterfront"), and himself creator of the Today Show. With just 24 guest rooms, the Seitzes ran out of rooms long before they ran out of celebrities.

Even if they had one left to name, it is highly unlikely they would have so honored Carlo Gambino, the late mobster who was less than enthusiastical ly welcomed (his bodyguards were told to keep their distance). Gambino insisted on cooking spaghetti for all the other guests. Sue Seitz remembers that "It was terrible. It all stuck together, but everyone was afraid to tell him, and we all ate it anyway."

British set designer Oliver Messel, an uncle of Lord Snowdon, came several times. Having already redone the Cotton Club on Mustique where Snowdon and Princess Margaret used to vacation, Messel looked at the collection of miscellaneous old furniture and told Suzanne to add a lot of wicker and paint everything white. She did, and now the Oloffson appears even more eclectic and exotic.

"He told me to make it like a stage, and we did," Sue says. "He would all come in a funny month, like May, when there aren't many guests, and we became great friends. It was an odd friendship, because he was very old and I was very young. But he knew what the hotel should look like. He was the most important guest who was ever here."

Another celebrity was Mick Jagger, who arrived first with this then-wife Bianca, and years later, as Al lay dying of cancer, returned with his girlfriend Jerry Hall. Al, by then in great pain and heavily medicated, came out of his delirium to recognize the rock idol.

"Mick is one of the sweetest people you'd ever want to meet," Sue recalls. "He climbed into bed with Al and held him in his arms like a child to comfort him. Pretty soon Jerry got in too, and so did I. And we all just lay there to make him feel better."